From humans possessed by unseen masters to a seemingly indistructible Venusian Flying Carpet with an appetite for mankind, from a conquering race of cones and cylinders to a living clog no one would ever want to find in the drain, here are our future nightmares, the enemies that await—both within and outside—our world. From a small town in Kansas to the seas of Venus to worlds countless light-years from home, take a tour of the alient terrors that have marked humanity as their perfect prey in—

ISAAC ASIMOV’S

WONDERFUL WORLDS OF SCIENCE FICTION

MONSTERS

I can’t get really enthusiastic about this anthology, but it does have the good fortune to have a number of really good stories in it, including A.E. van Vogt’s “Black Destroyer,” Murray Leinster’s “Exploration Team,” and Robert Silverberg’s “Passengers.” It has only one story I really don’t like, “The Shapes” by one J.J. Rosny Aine. It has nothing by Asimov, either.

The worst thing about this anthology is an artifact of my particular copy, which has one of those incredibly annoying card-stock ads for the Science Fiction Book Club glued to the spine (so that it can’t be removed without a great deal of trouble). I don’t suppose there’s any real problem in having a twenty-two-year-old invitation to join the SFBC lying around—but having it glued into a book is really, really annoying.